


Forgive Us Our Trespasses

by sonicSymphony



Series: Terrestrial Trolling [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Broken Bones, F/M, Horrorterrors - Freeform, Humanstuck, Urban Exploration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-30
Updated: 2015-07-30
Packaged: 2018-04-12 03:13:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4463309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sonicSymphony/pseuds/sonicSymphony
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wherein Eridan and Feferi come home for Thanksgiving to find that an old house long impenetrable has been made accessible, and even though Eridan probably <em>shouldn't</em> go inside, he does. <em>Of course he does,</em> Feferi thinks, <em>he's an idiot</em>.</p><p>But there's a reason it's open when it wasn't before, and it's not because whatever being controlling the house decided it was time to be a model for some flighty hipster.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Forgive Us Our Trespasses

**Author's Note:**

> I seem to be unable to leave something a oneshot.
> 
> If you read No Trespassing (which used to be Locational Trolling) a long time ago, you'll notice there are some changes: the blog is now called Terrestrial Trolling, that is the name of the _series_ , and I have completely lost control of my life. If you're interested in my downward spiral, read along and note my annoyance that I've had to leave a character out of the tags because it is a big fucking spoiler. :|

Savannah, Georgia is pretty damn famous for being one of the most haunted cities in the US. Despite its few warm niceties (like the house of the founder of Girl Scouts and its gorgeous cobblestone streets in the downtown area), this place is a cesspool of decrepit places and spine-chilling supernatural entities. You grew up liking the idea of the paranormal because you’ve been going on ghost tours since you were in a stroller and your parents are deeply superstitious, especially your father—he grew up here and swears to this day that it was a poltergeist that gave him one of the scars that adorns his face.

But now you’re an adult in age, turning twenty-one in two months—then you’ll be able to go on the pub crawl ghost tours, you can’t wait—and you should’ve decided by now whether or not you _actually_ believe in ghosts. Fef sure as hell does; she’d have tea parties with demons who could rip her heart straight out of her chest if she had a mind to. Sometimes she indulges in the occult, and she’s tried to drag you into Wicca before, but the things she does (especially the bits of blood magic) often scare you, so all you do is beg her to be careful and try to make yourself believe that spirits don’t exist anyway. It’s all just meant for fun.

She and Ara would get along like a house on fire (and it’s reasonably likely that if they got together, something would actually get burned down), and you did introduce them a year or two ago. Fef says they chat about dead things and rituals and once she asked for your opinion on the color of an Ouija board Ara told her to buy on Amazon; you told her that there was no way she was going to use one of those things. You’d like to keep her alive and unpossessed, thank you very much.

 _“Eridan don’t worry, it’s only_ white people _who get haunted in horror movies!”_

 _“Good to know that_ your _Polynesian ass is safe. Last time I checked, though, I’m pretty damn white!”_

 _“Only_ half _though! If a demon tries to kill you, just tell it that your mom is Peruvian and you should be fine!”_

_“Oh my God I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.”_

She didn’t end up buying it, thank God.

One day, you hope you’ll be able to see all of these nerds you met on the internet in real life. Some good shit will go down, but until at least three of you can afford international travel, you’re stuck with your Pesterchums and your shared blog. You’d love to do some photography together—a group set of some of the creepiest abandoned places on Earth, pictures of the same location but with different shooting styles and cameras and you’d probably even get in a few of each other’s shots. You daydream about it sometimes, especially now that you can’t really feed your interest in urban exploration since your ankle is pretty damn broken.

Despite this setback, you wanted to go out and see the town a bit, so Fef is currently driving through the historic district. You’d walked (well, Fef had walked, you had to hobble along on crutches, and you’re actually getting pretty damn good with them) down the path near the harbor already, and now you’re having her go to the outskirts of the district to an area that’s more rural, where you find the appropriate dirt road with a NO TRESPASSING sign nailed to a tree near the entrance.

“Turn there,” you direct.

Sighing, she complies. “I should’ve known you wanted to go here. Why do you always check on it? We never even go inside!”

“I’m waiting for an opportunity, seeing as you can’t really _get_ inside,” you say, already getting your camera out of the bag at your feet. “Plus, I want a picture of it for the new blog header we’re doing, since this place really embodies what Terrestrial Trolling is about.”

She doesn’t comment, and you drive a couple of miles back into the woods, only passing one structure: a mobile home long abandoned, mold turning the blue house green and the vegetation completely overgrown. You’ve looked around in it before. It’s nothing special.

The place you’re going _is_ special, though. There are so many rumors about it and you don’t know what’s true and what’s not. What you’ve managed to dredge up from historical records is that it was built in the late 1700s and abandoned in the late 1800s. The only verbose owners on record complained about how dead animals were often found all over the premises, and there was always a draft even if the windows were shut. They left the house when their youngest son fell down the stairs, snapping his neck and killing him.

Other than those facts, everything else is just rumors and stories, told by old locals and online forums. Some say that a Satanist group in the seventies did human sacrifices there and that’s why it’s so hard to get into now. One man told you about a mass suicide that took place at the turn of the 20th century, people hanging themselves from the second floor balcony. You’ve seen firsthand the things people had spray painted over the boarded-up windows—actually, calling them “boarded-up” is an understatement, they’re completely covered in planks and as far as you can tell; the bits that look like they’ve been pried up have even more wood under them. The words are messages and warnings, telling people not to go inside or else face the wrath of demons. Someone had even painted the Lord’s Prayer on the front door. Not even ghost tours go here; a lot of people don’t even know it exists.

You’ve wanted to be the first to explore it since you stumbled across it when you were thirteen. You know no one else has documented it—you’ve seen a forum post of the one urban explorer who tried, and she said that her group couldn’t get in through any of the windows, and the front door’s locking mechanism and the wood surrounding it was much more recent than the rest of the house. They hadn’t been able to break through, and after trying for nearly an hour, she felt nauseous enough that she knew it was time to stop trying. Her story sounds legitimate, because you know from experience that this place is almost break-in proof. You also hadn’t had any luck with the windows, and the front door is surprisingly sturdy. You’d tried to break it down, but it would hardly even budge, and Fef couldn’t pick the lock. You’ve considered trying to break straight through the rotting walls, but when you planned it out fully when you were seventeen, you’d started having nightmares about suffocating inside of the walls with dead rats and demons. You couldn’t go through with it after a week of night sweats and almost no sleep. If the house wanted to retain some structural integrity, fine. You’d find another way.

The dirt road leads to the back of the house, where another NO TRESPASSING sign warns you to turn away, and the message DO NOT ENTER is spray painted in huge letters across the boarded-up windows and wooden paneling of the house. This place is a mansion, one of the first examples of Gothic Revival architecture around. You don’t know what the original color of the house was because now all it shows is the damp brown color of the wood it was built with, as well as streaks of green mold and moss. It’s three stories in all, and you wonder if there’s a basement; almost no homes around here have one, but if there was one house that had one, you’d think it would be this monstrosity.

Fef parks around the side and you both get out. Trying to ignore the oppressive lack of road noise and birdsong, you remind yourself that you don’t really believe in haunted shit and start for the front. You have to tread slowly and carefully, as there’s a thick coating of leaves on the ground and a crutch could slip on them at any moment.

As you come around the front of the house, a breeze picks up, making the leaves rustle. The silence isn’t so deafening now, and you stop, reaching down to turn on your camera—it’s currently hanging around your neck—before heading further away from the house so you can get a better shot. Fef has stopped, though, and you do too when she speaks. “Eridan,” she says softly, sounding equal parts stunned and excited, and you turn back to glance at her. She points at the house. “ _Look_.” You do, and your mouth falls open slowly.

The front door is open.

You never thought this would happen. There could be someone in there, someone who finally managed to break through, but there isn’t another car or any signs of people—not even beer cans, which usually litter abandoned places. There’s no way the door is actually open. It’s… It’s an optical illusion, it’s your mind showing you want you want. It’s not really there.

Gulping, you lift your camera and snap a five photos in quick succession. Looking at the viewing screen, you confirm that yeah, the door in the photos is indeed open. As you drop your camera, the strap digging into your neck momentarily, a grin breaks out on your face and you start forward towards the porch. “You’re going to have to help me with the stairs,” you tell Fef.

“I don’t think you should go in,” she says, walking ahead of you. “You just broke your ankle in a house that was in a lot better shape than this one; you could easily fall again and break something else, or even hurt your ankle _more_. Do you want surgery? I don’t think you do.”

“I’m not gonna need surgery just because I explored a house,” you say confidently. “Fef, this might be my only chance to see what’s inside. What’re the fucking odds that we’d show up and the place is just _wide open_? I’ve been coming here for over seven years and never seen anything like this! We need to take this chance.”

“I’ll go and take some pictures for you,” she says, stopping right in front of the four porch steps and turning to face you. “You’re being an idiot!”

“Come on, it doesn’t even hurt anymore, see?” You wiggle your toes and shake it a bit for effect. That makes it ache slightly, but those actions used to make you double over in agony. “See? I’m totally fit for exploration! I’ve even been practicing running with my crutches. It’s not that hard as long as you have good upper body strength, which I do—”

“Fine,” she sighs, cutting you off. “You can come in. But we’re staying on the first floor, sticking together the entire time, and you are _not_ going to run with your crutches. You are going to hop along at a boring, careful pace. Okay?”

“Great,” you agree, nodding once sharply. Getting right up to the porch, you make sure you have solid footing and grab one of the railings, then take the crutch out from under that arm and maneuver so you’re holding both. “Put these on the porch and then help me up.”

She takes them and leans them against the house next to the open door. Up close, you can barely see inside but you can just make out a hallway with picture frames on the walls and the beginning of a staircase. (Screw what Fef said. You will be going up those stairs, goddammit.) Coming back down to stand next to you, Fef loops one of your arms around her shoulders and gets a firm grip on your waist; with your free hand, you grasp the railing, and between the two of you, you get up the stairs easily. You continue leaning on the railing as Fef fetches your crutches, and before you enter the house, a sort of weird feeling enters your stomach. “Wait a sec,” you tell Fef, picking up your camera and pointing it at the doorway.

The lens refocuses and you even tap the shutter button once to make sure facial recognition is working. No squares pop up in the darkness, so you accept that there probably aren’t any ghosts in the main entryway. Fef pokes her head in the doorway, looks around for a second, then comes back out. “There’s a flashlight in the glove compartment, right?” she asks.

“Yeah.” Your dad has stuck a flashlight in every Ampora car. It’s strong—definitely a good fit for this sort of thing.

“I’m going to get it; not even a speck of light is coming in from the windows,” she says, going back down the stairs and leaving you there by yourself. You watch her go around the side of the house, drumming your fingers on the handle of your crutch, and nervousness begins to build. You’ve had some bad feelings in the past when you went exploring in dank places. Usually, it’s just general feelings of uneasiness and you just ask Fef, “You feel okay?” and if she does, you know there’s nothing to worry about. Most of the time, if she feels even just a tiny bit anxious, you’re already shaking and sweating and ready to bolt.

You’re a pretty flighty asshole, sure, but you generally like to think you keep a cool head with things like this; really, though, it’s Fef who’s practically unflappable.

When she comes back, you both stand before the gaping entrance of the house. Fef starts bouncing on her the balls of her feet from the excitement of all this, even going as far to emit a small squeal that sounds like it came from some preppy preteen finding the perfect skirt on the clearance rack in Abercrombie. _This is it!_ you both think. You can’t help but smile and laugh under your breath, and then you go in.

Fef shivers as you step inside, making a short, jittery noise as she does so, and it makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. She seems unperturbed by the chill though, turning to you with a grin. “Where should we start?”

Three options greet you: a sitting room immediately to the right that doesn’t seem to have any entryways to other parts of the house, the stretching hallway with its numerous doors and arches farther down, and the stairs. One of those options is ruled out for now, and you figure the sitting room will be easy to hit on the way out, so you start down the hallway, the sound of your crutches hitting the floor muffled by the old, untreated wood.

You find the den, and it’s almost like time has stood still. Besides the layer of dust coating everything, it all seems to be perfectly preserved: the couches are shiny leather, lampshades burst with color, the taxidermied animal heads on the walls seem like they could’ve been alive yesterday, the fireplace looks like it’s just waiting for a match to set it alight. Unlike the barren walls of the house’s outside, there’s elegant wallpaper, light blue with swirling white designs near the ceiling. You wish the windows weren’t so boarded up, because natural lighting makes for better shots, but your flash has done you well in the past and it continues to get good enough results now. Fef knows little of respect for boundaries—even old homes like this have them—so as you take photos, she picks things up and examines them.

Just as you’re about to leave the room and move on, she exclaims, “Ooh, take my picture!” She’s picked up a fire poker and is holding it like a bat, grinning like she just got into the baseball hall of fame. A corner of your mouth quirks up and you take the shot; her eyes glowing red from the flash. You’ll be able to photoshop that away later.

You find the kitchen next, then various sitting rooms, then a tiny elevator that’s operated by hauling a rope. It was probably used by servants to send meals and such between floors. With that, you head back down the hall towards the front entrance only to find yourself facing another hallway.

“Fef,” you call back behind you, glancing over your shoulder to where she’s lingering by the tiny lift, “this is the way we came, right?”

She comes to stand behind you, placing a hand on your arm and looking past you. “I think so,” she says, brow scrunching. You both peer down the hall that ends in blackness, even when Fef shines her light down. “Stay here,” she directs, then goes to the first door.

“I’m not your fuckin’ dog, don’t tell me to stay,” you say, but there’s no venom in it. You hobble a couple of steps behind her and pause when she does. You watch her try and fail to open a door.

Her frown is large. “Come oooon,” she groans, wiggling the door handle back and forth, but it seems to be firmly locked. “I guess I’ll try the other one,” she sighs, walking across the hall and trying that door. It’s locked, too.

She tries the next two in the row as well, but they’re also locked. Huffing, she stops and puts her hand on her hip, shining her light down the hall to illuminate more doors and still not finding the end of the hall. Her light feels dimmer here, for some reason. Maybe the darkness is just more oppressive since you’re in the interior of the house, where none of the walls are shared with the outside.

You come up behind her, and it feels harder to move for some reason. You realize you’re slouching reflexively and straighten your back more, so you can swing easier. Somehow that simple action makes you feel more exposed, and a shiver shoots down your spine. Fef still seems unperturbed though, and that makes you feel better.

“I could break down one of the doors,” you suggest.

Fef snorts. “With what, one of your crutches? You’ll break your neck.”

“Fine,” you say, irritated, “then you do it.”

She fiddles with a door knob one more time then huffs. “I don’t want to break in,” she says. “It just… feels like we shouldn’t.”

“Why?”

You don’t want a confirmation of the odd feeling in the pit of your stomach, but she gives one anyway. “I feel like we’re being watched. That’s not necessarily _bad_ ,” she stresses, rising onto the balls of her feet then lowering herself back down, “because I feel like that all the time when I go to places with you. Bad things usually don’t happen in those situations! But I still think we should be careful.”

She brushes past you to go back the way you came, and you follow; she goes back into the den where you started, and you watch her flit around the room, sending the beam of her flashlight into nooks that she felt like she hadn’t completely explored the first time. A few minutes later, you’re heading back out of the room and down the hall again, but this time you see the staircase and daylight streaming in from the open front door.

“What the fuck,” you say flatly.

“Thank you!” Fef says, grinning at the ceiling, but you still see tension coiling in her shoulders. “Let’s go look in that front room, and then we’re out of here.”

“Wait,” you say, looking over to a door behind the stairs that had been hidden from your original vantage point by the front door. “Let’s look in here.” You head over, and unlike the doors in the long hallway, this one opens for you, with only a faint squeak of the hinges.

Ah _ha_ , there _is_ a basement! Your triumph is cut short when the smell hits you—it stinks of rotten eggs, a sulfuric kind of smell that makes you want to slam the door and go sniff pleasantly scented candles. The “basement” turns out to be a walk-in closet-sized space at the foot of a short set of stairs that begin immediately after the doorframe, leading down to an area only consisting of one rickety table holding rotten sacks of what appears to be coal and one shelf mounted to the wall with an empty, overturned wine bottle laying on it. Rancid water submerges some of the stairs and the bottom of the shelf, rising to a couple of inches below the table. You need Fef’s light to get a good picture. “Fef, come look at this,” you request.

She approaches and shines the light in the room. Keeping your camera level with your navel, you hunch as much as you can to see the view screen as you take a couple of shots, with and without flash for good measure.

Right before you take your last picture, the facial recognition flicks on. A box hovers on the water, like someone is swimming and looked up at the camera, and you’re so startled you almost drop it. You slowly click the shutter button, and the photo takes. When you go to take another one, just to check, the camera doesn’t identify any faces in the darkness.

Stupid malfunctioning camera, making you nearly piss yourself.

You think that covers most of the first floor, besides the front sitting room that you said you’d cover on the way back out. Despite feeling like the place is closing in on you, you know you have to get up to the second and third floors. You have a plan, and you implement it when Fef is distracted by the carvings of snakes woven into the legs of a table in the sitting room. Leaning your crutches against the wall at the foot of the stairs, you get a good grip on each of the railings and heave yourself up two stairs at a time, just like you do at home. The entire time, you’re worried that the bannister is going to break from your weight or your foot is going to smash a hole in the stairs, but you get up them just fine; the only issue is one stair in the middle is completely gone, but you hop over it without difficulty.

“Fef,” you call once you’re at the top, surrounded by near darkness. “Come here!”

Being alone in the dark makes the nervousness that set in when you were lost in the hallway surge. You stare at the open front door and the light downstairs until Fef comes into your line of sight and shines the flashlight up at you. “Goddammit, Eridan,” she sighs harshly, and you smirk and preen at your deviousness. “Get back down here!”

“I already made it up!” you protest, leaning heavily on the railing. Then you realize if it breaks, you’d fall to the floor a story below, so you scoot back and distance yourself from the edge, but still hold on. The top bannister doesn’t look very stable; you see multiple rungs that are broken. “Just bring me my crutches!”

“I don’t care,” she says. “I’m doing this so you don’t get hurt. Come back down.”

Time for Phase 2 of the plan. “Okay, fine,” you huff, reaching for a rung that’s broken at the bottom and making it look like you’re just trying to steady yourself, “I’ll—”

You lean back and the rung snaps with a loud _crack_ , making you stumble back and fall. It’s especially convincing because you didn’t know there was a table or something behind you and the back of your head smacks into the edge of it; you yelp, and once you hit the ground, you groan, “Oww,” reaching to the back of your head and feeling it. There’s no blood, but you think you might get a lump.

A clatter alerts you to Fef grabbing your crutches then coming upstairs, and you warn her, “There’s a step missing.”

A brief pause in her footfalls lets you know she’s stepped over it successfully, and soon she’s leaning over you, a frown pulling down the corners of her lips. “You’re a moron,” she says matter-of-factly.

“I know,” you agree, grinning. “Help me up?”

She does, and once you’re standing, she questions, “You did that on purpose, didn’t you?”

“Mhmm.”

“Rude!”

“If it makes you feel any better,” you add, “I did actually hit my head. On that.” You nod to the now-lit up tray table, which displays an incredibly dusty vase.

Reaching up, she feels the back of your head, running her fingers over the bump. You cringe at the contact and she _tsk_ s, saying, “Oh, you’re _fine_. Don’t be such a baby.”

You watch her as she looks back and forth down the new hall. There are more doors and the hall has a sharp turn at each end; there’s plenty more to explore. She swallows, then looks at you, brows drawing together. “Do you… feel okay?” she asks, almost warily.

Honestly, you feel like you might throw up, but you’re trying to ignore that for now. “It doesn’t matter,” you say. “I need to see this.”

When her expression shifts, you want to leave. Screw the house, screw your pictures, Fef is no longer feeling it so it’s time for you to go. But then she sighs and looks at the ground before deciding left is the right way. “Just… stay close to me. Don’t pull that kind of stunt again.”

“Okay,” you say quietly, following.

It’s the same old song and dance up here. Everything is so interesting to you, and that almost makes you forget about the anxiety that’s been building and building. You have to peel your clammy hands off the handholds for your crutches each time you let go, and you’re jumpy and paranoid. Fef has gone uncharacteristically quiet, and even though she leads she stays as close to you as she can, always laying a hand on your arm when you stop to take some photos.

By the time you’ve covered the entire second floor, your ears are ringing from the silence. You’re shaking so badly you feel like you might fall, and when you make it back to the stairs, you look up the final flight. Just as you’ve become accustomed to, it’s only darkness above, but you _have_ to look, even though your blood has been replaced by liquid panic.

“Eridan we shouldn’t be here, let’s _go_ ,” Fef implores as you try to hand off your crutches to her. “You never have to listen to me again when we go exploring if we leave _right now_.”

“You haven’t really said anything is wrong,” you say softly, lifting one of your hands up to run it through your hair. It messes it up, but your hands need to do _something_. “Why do you suddenly want to leave?”

“I’ve been trying not to scare you,” she hisses. “Eridan, this is the _worst_ I’ve ever felt. I don’t want to get lost again.”

Swallowing, you whisper, “If you’re scared, you can wait in the car,” ignoring that your voice shakes.

“You feel it too,” she says, her grip on the flashlight tightening. “If I leave you here by yourself, I’m not completely sure you’d ever come out. That’s honestly how I feel right now!”

“One more floor,” you beg, “and then we’ll go. I’m going to deny ‘feeling it’ so I don’t have to accept it. We’re never going to get this chance again! I just want to make this worth it.” When she says quiet, begging you to go with her eyes, you say, “I’m going, with or without you.”

She releases her breath slowly, then snatches your crutches. You have to quickly grab onto the railing to steady yourself. “God, I hate you,” she snaps, then pauses when she sees the wounded look on your face. She blinks hard, like she’s trying to wake herself up, then says, “That… wasn’t very nice. Sorry.” With a strange expression settled over her features, she goes up the stairs.

Gulping to swallow both your nervousness and your hurt, you follow. It turns out there’s only two rooms upstairs: a big open landing at the top of the stairs, the walls covered in old paintings, and a door at the end of it. There’s a hatch in the first room, and you think it leads to an attic, but seeing as the last attic you were in wasn’t structurally sound, you decide it’s not worth looking in. You take photos of each of the paintings, and on the last one, your camera’s low battery signal starts flashing in the corner. Better make this quick, then.

Fef leads you to the door, and it opens without trouble. “Careful,” Fef warns when she steps into the room, shining the light all around. “The floor is damp.”

Moving slower than you were, you limp into the room, and find that Fef has stopped in her tracks in the middle of it, shining her light on the ground. The room is small, windowless, and empty, and you think it might’ve been an office when it was inhabited. It’s dead silent except for a small dripping noise that you can’t seem to find the source of, though it explains the dampness. The sulfuric smell is back, though it’s weaker here than it was in the basement. You think you smell a tinge of copper too, which makes the air feel electrified. The walls are painted the same color as the floor—a natural, pale wood brown, and you think it’s an odd choice.

Something odder, however, is the graffiti.

You have to call it that, because you will not admit otherwise. On the floor in the center of the room, there is a picture of a house, made of some strangely-arranged squares and triangles, all perfect straight edges and deep, uniform crimson in color. Surrounding the house are two circles, the thin space between the two filled with runes that you can’t decipher. Stretching outward from the symbols are winding tendrils what twist outward, making the entire picture seem like an elaborate sun filled in with wingdings font.

“It’s a summoning circle,” Fef says, mouth barely moving and standing on the lowest ray of sunlight. “I… I tried to do one myself when I was younger and didn’t quite know what to do. My pattern was different, though.” She crouches down and touches the floor. “It’s still wet.”

“Is this really blood?” you ask, voice high.

“Not human,” she says, but she doesn’t sound completely sure. “Probably sheep’s blood or something.”

Taking a deep breath, you start moving backwards so you can get a shot with everything in it. “I’m starting to feel like we’re in an incredibly stereotypical horror movie, so I’m going to take this pictu—!”

And then you’re falling, dropping your crutches in an effort to throw your hands down to stop your face from slamming into the ground. You’re successful; you land hard on your injured side, but your right hand and forearm take the brunt of the impact, slamming against the wood. For some reason, the floor under your hands is damp even though you didn’t land near the circle, and as Fef hurries over rambling, “Oh my God I knew you were going to _actually_ fall and hurt yourself more, are you okay? What happened?” you prop yourself up and get into a sitting position.

“I’m fine,” you say, feeling dazed. Your hands got scraped a little but they hardly sting. It’s what you fell into that you’re concerned about. “The crutch on my bad side slipped in the—” You swallow, rubbing the tacky liquid you’re almost _positive_ is more blood, like the summoning circle itself, on your pants.  There’s a puddle of it, outside the circle and seeping into the wood. It’s darker than the stuff used deliberately, like there’s more of it. “Blood. I got unbalanced and fell.”

“Did you jolt your ankle?” she asks as she puts her hands under your armpits and hauls you up; you balance on one foot with your hand on the wall, still standing in the blood stain, as she picks up your crutches.

You get resituated, wiggling your toes to make sure everything feels alright, and you reply, “Not really.” It’s starting to throb somewhat, but it normally does that when you haven’t been able to prop it up in a while.

Something wet lands on your nose and you flinch, leaning to one side as you raise a hand to feel it. Two of your fingertips come away bloody.

Nausea crashes over you as you stare at your hand; you see it starting to shake. Your lips part like you want to scream, but you don’t make a sound. Fef has turned her back on you to look at the painting on the floor again, but you call her attention again, squeezing your eyes shut. “Fef, love, could you look up?” _I can’t do it._

It’s silent for a couple of seconds, but then she says, “At what? It’s just the ceiling.”

Releasing a shuddery breath, you open your eyes and look at the ceiling above you, and Fef shines her light up there. The ceiling is low and wooden, and since you’re on the top floor, it probably is the base of the attic. You won’t be going in another attic for a while, even if you’re sickeningly curious, and now you’re just plain sickened. “Look, there’s a dark spot,” you say, and another blood drop falls and hits your glasses. You shriek a bit and stumble back, almost falling again but Fef grabs the front of your shirt, dropping the flashlight as she does so.

The light goes out, and you’re plunged into darkness.

You can hear the blood roaring in your ears and your heavy breathing. Fef sounds calm when she whispers, “Are you steady?”

“Yeah,” you murmur back.

Her hands leave you, and a dim light goes on as she takes out her phone and uses it to find where the flashlight rolled to. It’s a few feet away, in the center of the circle, and she walks over there, pockets her phone, bangs the back of it a few times, and then you can see again.

When you frantically look around, nothing has changed, and you breathe a sigh of relief, but then realize you still have blood on your lens. Fef strides over to you quickly, taking your glasses and wiping them on the hem of her shirt before sliding them back onto your face. That side is a little streaky now, but you can still see so it’s fine.

You can see uneasiness in Fef’s expression, but she doesn’t vocalize it. Figuring that your foray into this room can’t be for nothing, you take your camera and try to snap a picture, but your hands and shaking badly and it won’t focus. Maybe it got busted when you hit the ground. Without a word, Fef takes the strap off your neck and hefts the camera herself, getting it to focus and taking a couple of snapshots of the floor before handing it back. “I think it’s time to—”

“Shh,” you say suddenly, eyes snapping back toward the ceiling. She shuts up, and then you hear it again: very soft footsteps in the attic.

Your mind is screaming _get out, get out, GET OUT!_ and you’d run if you could but your ankle is damn _useless_ ; it’ll slow both you and Fef down and it’s going to get you _killed_ , like you’re sure someone was killed above you, their blood dripping down onto you.

“Quietly,” Fef whispers, moving silently to the door. Your crutches make a _tah-thuh, tah-thuh_ sound as they hit and leave the ground, but your shoe falls softly on the floor and you’re scared shitless when you’re handing Fef your crutches to descend the stairs and you hear the attic hatch shift.

You don’t scream. You _can’t_ scream. Fef takes the stairs two at a time and you swing down three, then almost fall as you round the corner on the second floor and start the last set of stairs as you hear something drop upstairs with a loud _thud_ , and you wonder if that’s what you sounded like when you hit the ground after falling through the ceiling at the inn. There’s bubbling then another clatter; a gust of freezing wind brushes past you, almost making you lose your grip on the railing. You practically throw yourself down the stairs, praying that you don’t fuck up and fall.

Luckily, you don’t fall down the stairs.

Unfortunately, Fef does.

She forgot about the missing stair in the middle until she was already stepping forward, and she tried to compensate but her balance was off so she fell without a yell, dropping your crutches and tumbling the last six stairs to the bottom. She may not make a sound besides the air being knocked out of her lungs, but you shriek, “ _Fef_!” and rocket down the last few steps, dropping to your knees next to her when you hit the bottom, ignoring how your toes hit the ground and send a lance of pain through your leg. _Oh God_ she could’ve broken her neck or her back or her pelvis—

She’s already starting to get up, and you scramble for your crutches as she says quietly, “I… I’m okay, just kind of out of breath.” She jogs for the front door—oh thank God it’s still open you’d fucking kill yourself if someone (some _thing_ ) had shut it—and you run-hobble behind her as it sounds like the table upstairs is being knocked over, shattering the vase.

“ _Wait_.”

The voice comes from behind you, and it’s much milder than you would’ve expected coming from some kind of ghost or demon: it’s pleasant, feminine, and _young_. The request is said like it’s coming from some sort of scholar that was in the middle of showing you her research on 1820’s Paris and you’d started to rise before she was done, but even if the voice is normal, it doesn’t stop you; what kind of idiot would pause when they are being chased by something that is so obviously malevolent?

Fef slams the door once you’re out, neither of you looking back into the darkness before she does, and you both stand on the porch for a minute, panting.

Then she breaks into hysterical giggles, and you can’t help but follow, though your breaths of air between peals of laughter are sobs. She hugs you hard, squeezing and squeezing and _squeezing_ and you rememorize the smell of her—the salt and the sweat and the strawberry-scented shampoo. As you embrace, someone knocks on the front door from the other side, creepily polite, and then you’re both bolting for the porch steps, her helping you down and then going around the side of the house to the car. You both practically throw yourselves in, and she starts it, puts it into drive, and turns around, peeling the fuck out of there and taking the dirt road three times faster than it should be driven. Within minutes, you’re bursting free of the woods and you’re done.

You idle at the mouth of the road, still breathing hard as you get yourself under control. She makes a choice, turning left and heading towards your house and yeah, you’ve definitely had enough sightseeing for the day, too. You notice that she’s gripping the wheel tight enough that her knuckles are almost white, but her ring finger on her right hand is almost sticking straight out and her pinky isn’t completely curled. “What’s wrong with your fingers?” you ask.

“Jammed them when I fell down the stairs,” she says, still sounding out of breath. “I’ll ice and buddy tape them when we get back.”

“If you can’t bend it, it’s probably broken,” you say, a sense of detachment from the situation falling over you. “We should stop by CVS and get a splint or two.”

“I don’t fucking care if they’re broken!” she snarls, her demeanor suddenly shifting. “I just want to go home! We can get a splint when I stop feeling like driving us off a bridge, okay?”

Her tone surprises you, and you swallow a response, gazing out the window instead. If she wants to blame you for this, fine. You did drag her in there.

You remember how she’d first proposed going in alone. You thank whomever the fuck is listening that she didn’t.

When you arrive home about ten minutes later, the garage is empty, meaning your parents are both gone. You go inside silently, adrenaline still pumping through you even now, and she helps you up the small steps in the garage and into the house. Something moves in the darkness and you shriek, but Fef flips the light on and it’s just your dog.

The St. Bernard is unfortunately a jumper, but before she can pounce you snap, “Caesonia, _no_!” and she immediately sits down and whines. Leading her to the back door, you let her outside to play in the yard until one of your parents gets home. Turning back to Fef, you tell her to follow you and head for the kitchen. She sits down heavily on one of the stools at the bar and you go to the freezer, taking out a fudgsicle and going back over to her, holding it in your teeth as you swing. “Eat this,” you say, dropping it into your hand once you’re stationary and holding it out to her. “We’ll use the stick for the splint.”

“When’d you become an expert on finger injuries?” she says, voice soft but still serious-sounding. Despite her morose tone, you know she’s teasing you.

“I jammed a couple as a kid, and my dad messed his up all the time,” you say as Fef takes the stick. “I got pretty good at figuring out what was broken and what wasn’t.”

You go to get the first aid kit out of the master bathroom. That means going up the stairs, so you just leave your crutches at the bottom and pull yourself up, then hop with a hand on the wall to the bathroom. You dig under the sink and grab the box, then go into your parents’ bedroom to grab one of your mother’s purses so you can carry the kit down with your hands free. By the time you get back to the kitchen, Fef is done with her fudgsicle and is staring at the wall; she doesn’t even look at you when you hobble back in. You sit down next to her, bracing your hands on the counter to lift yourself into the seat and leaning your crutches against the bar. “Can I see?” you request, pulling out the first aid kit and dropping the bag on the floor.

She holds out her hand, and you can tell she doesn’t like how quiet the room is either because she takes out her phone and puts her music on shuffle, turning the volume down low. You scoot your stool real close and lay her hand on yours. Her pinky is puffy around the main joint of the finger, but the one next to it is entirely swollen, beginning to bruise in the middle. “Oh, love,” you say softly. “Try to bend them for me?”

Her pinky curls about one-third of the way in, but her ring finger just bends the slightest bit then twitches. “Good,” you say, wanting to kiss the stains of color that are appearing high on her cheeks. “Can I feel a bit, see if either of them are broken?”

“Yeah,” she whispers. “Go ahead.”

“It’s probably gonna hurt,” you warn.

“It already hurts,” she says, and your stomach flip-flops. “Just do it.”

You start with the pinky since it doesn’t look as bad, lightly pinching each of the straight bones between her knuckles. She doesn’t flinch until you grasp the swollen joint, and you feel wretched when her hand darts back towards her some before she slides it back into your palm. “That one’s jammed,” you say almost certainly. She nods once, then looks at you in a way that tells you to get on with it.

This may just be you being melodramatic, but you feel like her ring finger has swelled more in the minute it took to look at her pinky. It’s discolored in the middle, the shiny yellow tinge in the center looking like disease and purple edging around it, near the joints on either end. You test the bottom and tip of the finger first, and she cringes each time but doesn’t move; however, when you lightly squeeze the middle of the finger between the two joints, she makes a low pained noise she jerks her hand back. You hold yours up, palms facing her and say, “Sorry, I’m sorry,” voice cracking. You’d warned her it could hurt and she wasn’t quite ready for it; neither were you. You feel sick. She swallows hard, and you see tears shining in her eyes but they don’t spill. She’s strong, your Fef. Stronger than you. “I think I felt a little give on that, I’d say it’s definitely a break.”

“Well, it seems lined up fine,” she says, her voice husky. Usually it’s sexy when she sounds like that, but now it just makes your heart hurt. “We’ll get a real splint on the way to the airport tomorrow, I don’t need to get an x-ray for it. It’s just a finger.”

You don’t protest, not wanting to fight with her now. Reaching forward slowly, you take her hand again, this time touching her broken finger as lightly as you possibly can and aligning the popsicle stick parallel under it, then you secure the stick with a bit of medical tape wrapped around her finger at points above and below where you think the break is. You go through the kit again to get some gauze, and you wrap the two fingers together, tight enough for support but not constricting. When it’s secure, you lift her hand to your lips and kiss each fingertip before holding her hand in both of yours. You don’t have a lot of empathy in you, but since your leg is currently in a cast, you have a pretty good idea of what she’s going through. You just sit for a minute, the music in the background making the silence less unnerving, but she soon breaks the peace by sliding off the stool and saying, “I’ll grab some ice for both of us.”

“‘Kay,” you sigh, getting off the stool and situating yourself with your crutches. As she fills up two plastic bags—hers sandwich size and yours a gallon bag—you head over to the cache of medication in one corner and find yours (plus grab an ibuprofen for Fef), swallowing a couple of pills then heading over to the fridge to grab a bottle of water. After taking a few sips, you stick it back in and head upstairs; Fef follows you, holding your crutches for you as you ascend. You go to your room and sit on your bed, laying back and propping up your ankle on a pillow with the ice pack inside of the pillowcase under your heel. You spread your legs and gesture for Fef to sit, and she does, curling up and snuggling right under your chin. She puts her hand on her thigh, grabs a few tissues from your nightstand, and balances the ice on top of the tissues on her fingers.

Once again, it’s quiet for a little while, until you start thinking about what happened today and you have to say, “I love you so much,” voice breaking.

“I know,” she murmurs, kissing the base of your throat.

“I love you,” you repeat. “I was so fucking scared.”

“I love you too. So was I.”

Eventually she sets the ice aside and turns around, straddling your hips and kissing you. There’s franticness in it that you can’t help but mirror, grabbing at her like you need to know for sure she’s there, and soon you’re pulling each other’s shirts off and running on adrenaline that has barely faded. You remember when you’d first broken your ankle, she’d told you she wasn’t going to have sex with you until you’d significantly healed, but you _need_ this, you need to be close to her, and you think she needs it too. Nothing you know about the world makes complete sense anymore except for holding Fef, loving Fef, and making sure she knows that you never want to leave her.

 

* * *

 

You start editing the photos after a two hour nap. You got the shit scared out of you for these—you’re surely going to make them worth it. You don’t wake Fef up, tucking her under the covers and trying to make sure she’s comfy. There are bruises on her torso and arms and thighs from falling down the stairs; earlier you’d kissed each one and hated yourself because you got her into that situation in the first place. 

Thinking about the kid who died on those stairs, you shudder. Today could’ve been so much worse.

Hopping as silently as you can over to your desk, you sit down in the swivel chair and open your laptop. The light blinds you momentarily, and you turn the brightness down. You’d placed your camera on the desk earlier, and now you connect it to your computer and upload all of the photos. Just watching the thumbnails flash by as they’re transferred makes you feel sick.

Wanting to talk to someone about this, you pull up Pesterchum, but none of your fellow urban explorers are online. You’d like to talk to Ara the most, so even though her name is grayed out, you send her a message anyway.

\--caligulasAquarium [CA] began pestering apocalypseArisen [AA]\--  


CA: hey ara  
CA: i knoww youre offline noww but can you message me back as soon as you see this  
CA: you remember the house ivve talked to you about a feww times that ivve nevver been able to get into  
CA: wwell i got into it and i regret it so fuckin much it probably shavved ten years off my life  
CA: just message me back please  
CA: i think i believve in ghosts noww  
CA: and wworse things  


\--caligulasAquarium [CA] ceased pestering apocalypseArisen [AA]\--  


By the time you’re done with that, all of the photos have uploaded. You start editing the most normal ones first—aka, the ones taken at the beginning of your self-guided tour. You sift through ones that are out of focus and filled with too many orbs to be worth something, and you get through the first couple of rooms before you realize you didn’t take any in the dark hallway that seemed to disappear and reappear whenever it fucking pleased. You’re sort of glad you didn’t, because one of the pictures of the basement scares you enough for the night.

The basement photo is not just a picture of what you saw. There is a body floating in the water.

You can count the notches in the dead girl’s spine, settled between shoulder blades as sharp as needles. Her hair is so blonde it’s nearly white, short enough that it doesn’t cover her neck in the back but the tips of her front locks dangle in the water. From the angle of the photo, you can barely see the tip of her dainty nose and the curve of her lips and jaw, her mouth slack in death. Her eyes are hidden—the only thing left to the imagination, as she seems to have left the world the same way she entered it. The skin stretched over her looks decayed, pale gray and taut, and you’re distracted by horns—dark orange and cracked, they curl backwards like she brushed them along with her hair, extending to the back of her neck. These are what mark her as something inhuman, something Other; no one has such protrusions in your world. Her arms and legs drift under her, and you wonder how she’s still so buoyant. Maybe she died with her lungs full of air that never had the chance to get filtered.

Your common sense is screaming at you, telling you to be terrified for your life even now, because that _thing_ is unnatural, inhuman. It could be anything, known to this world or not, and you feel insignificant and afraid. Though your mind is telling you it’s a demon, or even simply the corpse of some girl stuck forever in a Halloween costume that you somehow missed when you were gazing on the site in person, a spiritual part of yourself that you thought shriveled up and died long ago whispers, _“God.”_

There’s a quiet whimper and you flinch at the sudden noise, but then your hear the covers shift and remember Fef. Minimizing Photoshop and pushing off from the desk, you roll across the room and hit the side of your bed, then move from the chair to the mattress, nearly sitting on one of Fef’s feet. She’s sweating and twitching, but still very much dreaming. “Feferi,” you say, voice low, and put a hand on her hip. You feel her recoil under the comforter. “Fef, come on love, wake up.”

She blinks awake, then takes a deep breath, reaching out to cup your cheek. You put your hand on hers. “Did I wake you?” she asks.

“Nah,” you say, tapping the glasses on your face as evidence. “I was looking at photos and you were squirming around. Bad dream?”

“I don’t really remember,” she says, her thumb slowly stroking your cheekbone, “but whatever it was, I think I’ll wait a while before going back to sleep. Show me the pictures.”

She must see something in the way your expression shifts even though you immediately try to cover up your dread, because her gaze sharpens and she asks, “What did you see?”

You open and close your mouth a few times, then swallow hard. You sort of don’t want to show her the one you were just looking at, seeing as she has enough nightmare fuel as it is, but you can’t imagine keeping it from her. “Come look for yourself.”

Shifting back into the chair, you roll back to your computer and then pat your lap. “Sit.”

Fef shakes her head. “Spread your legs. I don’t want to mess up your circulation.”

Rolling your eyes, you admit to yourself that you could never say no to that request from her. She slides in between them, and you wrap an arm around her waist and lean your chin on her shoulder as she pats your right knee. Her hand travels down and stops once it hits your cast, her finger trailing the rim of it. “How’s your ankle feel?”

“Alright,” you say, not really lying. It’s hardly bothering you. “Your fingers feeling okay?”

“They still hurt, but not as badly as they did,” she replies, wriggling slightly so she can kiss your cheek. “Now come on, get on with it!”

Clenching your jaw, you maximize the Photoshop window, and there it is. You feel Fef exhale in a _whoosh_ , and your grip tightens around her. Leaning in closer, she squints at it, and you can’t help but feel like it’s going to jump out at her like she’s playing some dumb horror game. “You photoshopped this in,” she accuses.

“I swear on my life that I didn’t,” you say. “You didn’t see this when we were there, right?”

“Of course not!” she exclaims. “If I had, you would know, because I would’ve dragged us out of there _immediately_.” It’s quiet for a minute as you both try to comprehend what the fuck it is until she suddenly says, “It isn’t really a girl,” with such certainty that you know she isn’t looking for your confirmation.

You give it anyway. “I sincerely doubt it.”

She purses her lips, thinking. “Email it to me, then delete it off your computer and your camera, plus delete the email from your ‘sent’ folder.”

“What?” you question, startled. “Why?”

“I’m getting some really bad vibes from it, so I’m going to use it for a ritual and see if I can figure out what it is,” she explains. “I don’t want it to be connected to you in any way when I do it.”

“No fucking way,” you say, shaking your head. “Are you insane? I’m just going to leave it for now, we can deal with it later.” You should be calling the police to tell them that there’s a murderer on the loose and they’re shacked up in that fucking house, but you can already imagine them saying, _“There’s no way for some guy to get through that door, kid, you’re nuts.”_ If not cops, you should be calling a fucking exorcist.

But if you did any of that, you’d have to accept that all of this has really happened.

Exiting out of that picture, you go back to the folder and open up a few of the ones that look good from the thumbnail, and Fef just watches as you tweak the filters and crop and adjust the contrast and such. When you get to the first clear photo of that final bloody room, you waste a few minutes just staring at that house-looking thing painted in the center of all the cacophony, worrying your lower lip and absentmindedly stroking Fef’s hip with your thumb. When the realization finally hits you, you quickly minimize Photoshop and open a window on Chrome, immediately going to Terrestrial Trolling and trawling through the archive.

“What’s up?” Fef asks, leaning back into you more.

“That house thing,” you say, leaning forward and squinting at the screen. “I’ve seen it before.”

You spend twenty minutes looking through photos until you see it spray painted in maroon on a subway wall in Tokyo—Aradia took the picture almost a year ago, and something within you stirs. You don’t think this is the one you remember seeing. You download the photo to your computer and continue looking, soon coming across the one you remember, which is a carving on a tree stump in Russia. Nepeta had visited Khabarovsk during the summer and did a whole special on it, and she’d included a series of tree carvings she’d found. The house was one of them, identical to both yours and Ara’s. Like you did before, you save the picture.

Now you have to look for one in Kar’s pictures, and you’re not disappointed. It’s scraped with chalk on a brick wall in his first blog post, made over four years ago, small enough that if you weren’t looking for it you never would’ve thought about it but _there it is_ , spread across years and continents and when you spend the next hour searching the internet for _anything_ that looks like it, you come up empty.

What the fuck?

 

* * *

 

\--apocalypseArisen [AA]  began pestering caligulasAquarium  [CA] \-- 

AA: finally!  
AA: i guess this is where the fun starts 0u0  


**Author's Note:**

> I'm working on the next part already. There's a different narrator and many more characters, but it'll answer a lot of questions! It might be the last one, but there may be four total. Who knows? Not me.
> 
> I might do some ficlets in this 'verse, because I want to write a direct prequel to this house's plotline in particular, so if you're interested in that, head over to my tumblr, sonicsymphony.tumblr.com. Also, if you're interested in this 'verse and want to prompt something, take a look at my FAQ and then drop one in my askbox!


End file.
